


My Beloved Maraclea

by thatheloved (bluedreaming)



Category: Like Minds | Murderous Intent (2006)
Genre: Brainwashing, Canonical Character Death, Emotional Manipulation, Guns, Implied/Referenced Incest, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Murder, Necrophilia, Non-Consensual Somnophilia, Somnophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-08
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-04-29 02:41:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5113190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluedreaming/pseuds/thatheloved
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Alex wanted something, really wanted something, he always got it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Beloved Maraclea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [angelette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelette/gifts).
  * Translation into Русский available: [My Beloved Maraclea](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8286904) by [j_winter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/j_winter/pseuds/j_winter)



> _I marked this story as_ **Underage** _because it's mentioned in the film that they're both seventeen._
> 
> The title is from the words written on the back of Nigel's Jack of Spades card in the film.  
> The excerpt from _Becket_ contains a portion of the text that Susan recited in the church.  
>  The quotations from Joyce are the text that Nigel read aloud in class.

_Louis of France loved me,_  
_and I dreamed that I loved Louis of France:_  
_and I loved Henry of England,_  
_and Henry of England dreamed that he loved me;_  
_but the marriage-garland withers even with the putting on,_  
_the bright link rusts with the breath of the first after-marriage kiss,_  
_the harvest moon is the ripening of the harvest,_  
_and the honeymoon is the gall of love;_  
_he dies of his honeymoon._  
— ELEANOR [Becket](http://www.telelib.com/authors/T/TennysonAlfred/play/becket/becketprologue.html)

 

_With a sudden movement she bowed his head. . ._

—James Joyce [A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/803341)

 

His bottom lip was chapped, when he first saw him. Maybe he'd been worrying it between his teeth. He was pale, sitting in the cafeteria, and Alex didn't like him. He didn't like him enough that he did.

That's how things were.

"It's for your own good," his father said, as though Alex had no thoughts of his own, only a blank slate to be scribbled over, useless daydreams and fancies and just another problem to slot into a hole, edges ground down and every fighting bone torn from his body, surgically removed like a kind of internal plastic surgery performed not by scalpels and knives but rather by words, glances, small frowns when his father wasn't looking, and finally a roommate, the final imposition, removing his last retreat.

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction," Virginia Woolf had written, but Alex could have argued that any person at all needed a room of their own to live. He had no home now, only the school, only the father standing on the podium with his Headmaster face on, sitting behind the desk in his office, always frowning.

His mother had taken his home away with her when she died, and Alex had loved her, needed her in the faint, helpless way that a child loves the idea of their mother, the idea of being safe, having a place to retreat to, but the fact of the matter was that she had long ago ceased to be a home, when her delusions began, when the shouting started, when Alex's father didn't come home anymore. Alex couldn't help hating her for that.

And that was how he felt about Nigel, when he first saw him, a fascination tempered by anger at having his last retreat taken from him.

 

_. . .and joined her lips to his and he read the meaning of her movements in her frank uplifted eyes._

—James Joyce [A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/803341)

 

Nigel wasn't like the other boys. He wasn't like Raj, a good boy and practically a coward, only coming along because he was Josh's roommate, or Josh himself, all soft and pudgy in face, round glasses and a laugh that sometimes made Alex want to break things. Alex kept Josh around because he was useful, because he knew all of Josh's secrets but Josh knew none of his.

"My dad wants me to be a politician," Josh had admitted one night, drunk on too much cheap second-rate ale, his breath stale on Alex's face, and Alex had wrinkled up his nose, considering pushing him away but inebriated people were always so pliable. So easily broken to one's will, rather like training a horse to a bit and saddle. Alex's lip curled slightly, before he smoothed his face back into a bored expression, but Josh hadn't even noticed, starting at the bottom of his empty ale glass like he was expecting more to magically appear from thin air.

"I just. . ." Josh's voice was getting more and more garbled now, his face drooping towards the table, but he kept talking, kept spilling the things that no one cared about, not even Alex, except as useful harvest he could garner from them. "I just want to be a nobody," Josh said to the wood grain of the table, his nose almost touching the surface, "I just want to have a little shop and sell video games or something and be allowed to love who I want to love. . ." He face planted into the table then, a soft sigh of flesh on wood before he began to snore, loudly, obnoxiously, but Alex had everything he needed to know. It wasn't about the politics at all.

Nigel wasn't like Raj or Josh, wasn't like the other even more inferior boys that filled the hallways. He was somehow apart, aloof, pale skin that Alex wanted to. . .

wanted to do something to. He just didn't know what yet.

 

_It was too much for him._

—James Joyce [A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/803341)

 

There were some things about Nigel that made him easier to approach, to wear down, to dig his fingers into. Nigel was cold, at least on the surface; he didn't talk much, just looked at everything as though from afar.

It infuriated Alex, the pent-up anger lapping like flames in his chest, sending twisted lumps of ash up his throat only to be swallowed down again, painfully.

But it was obvious, the more Alex watched Nigel, tracked his movements through the hallway, traced the nobs of his spine beneath his thin sleep shirt with his eyes as Nigel leaned over the desk, flipping pages, dissecting dead animals, and Alex pretending to be sleeping, that Nigel was, in a way at least, lonely.

Although whether he was aware of it was an entirely different matter.

It was yet another of those days, the kind where Alex just wanted to scream, to throw things and stab the Masters with their stupid little notions and blinders over their eyes, shout, "Open your eyes! Pull your heads out of your asses for once in your pathetic little lives and look at the world outside this tiny box of stone and British Academia!"

He got these now and again, when everything just seemed so futile, like he was never ever going to be free, be happy, be able to do anything he really wanted, even though he wasn't even exactly sure what he wanted—well sleep was one, that was for sure, and he wasn't getting much of that with Nigel keeping him awake with that lamp, curled over his desk, reading, always reading, _what interest does he find in that anyway?_ if he wasn’t cutting things up—and that was the reason he suddenly found himself arguing with Reverend Donaldson, spouting things out of his mouth, true things of course, but in a way that made the Master look like a complete and bloody idiot in front of the class.

It was fun, blowing off a little steam, and he noticed something then, something interesting. Nigel was watching him as he gathered up his books and stormed out of the room.

Nigel looked interested.

 

_He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her,_

—James Joyce [A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/803341)

 

Alex was beginning to see the web of an idea take shape: a kind of twisted courtship, if looked at objectively perhaps, a kind of mental rape, but Alex didn't see it that way.

Alex only saw goals, things he wanted, and how to achieve them.

His father had mentioned that Nigel's father, Dr. Colbie, was the Grandmaster of the order he was also a part of, a seat that Alex would be expected to inherit upon his father's death. Alex didn't really care about that kind of stupid nonsense, when all he wanted was to get out, to be alone, to be allowed to live, but Nigel was fascinated by history and Alex, well Alex was always good at using the tools he had at his disposal.

Like Josh and Raj.

"Look what I found?" he'd said, pretending to be upset and tossing Josh the notebook he'd found on Nigel's desk beneath more dead things. It had been easy then, to work Josh up, string him along into nothing more than his hands and feet.

And pressing the chloroformed cloth to Nigel's face, feeling him struggle under his hand, pressing down over his nose and mouth, watching in his peripheral vision as Josh stumbled away from Nigel's twitching arms and legs, that had felt good.

That had felt so good. He couldn't help letting out a sigh as Nigel's head lolled back, boneless against the pillow, it was so unexpected—he saw the expression on Josh's face change then, watched the knowledge work its way into his dull brain as he somehow put two and two together and made four.

 _Four for death,_ Alex thought, even as Josh helped him drag Nigel onto the train, and it was almost too easy, Nigel still half groggy with sleep, reflexes dull, to orchestrate the neat and tidy removal of Josh.

Too bad so sad.

Standing at the side of the grave, watching Josh's coffin being lowered into the ground, Alex had glanced up over to Nigel's face, tracing his lips with his eyes, the bottom lip still slightly chapped, always slightly chapped, and felt a warm weight in his hand and he imagined pressing a chloroformed cloth to Nigel's face again.

Alex knew he had to do it again.

 

_. . .body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world. . ._

—James Joyce [A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/803341)

 

The oldest game in the books. That was all it took to lure Nigel in, keep him dancing around Alex. Of course it helped that Nigel wasn't the most stable of individuals, anyone who even bothered to do a little research could see that—the way his father had a shotgun in the house for God's sake!—but all it took was for Alex to avoid Nigel, appear to completely and utterly despise him, while dropping mentions of the Knights Templar here and the Cathars there, the painting in the Assembly hall even, _Robert Bruce and the Battle of Bannockburn, 1314_ , everything relevant to class or conversations with the Masters who, unless he was baiting them, were usually eager to appear to be on good terms with the Headmaster's son.

It was helpful, in that sense, that after Josh's death Nigel was moved to a different room. Inconvenient for Alex, but only slightly. It kept Nigel circling, interested, and Alex hadn't grown up in the school for nothing. He knew the hallways and corridors like the back of his hand, could trace his path in the dark, and slipping into Nigel's single—because at least Alex's father had finally seen the light on that issue—was so laughably easy that it was almost boring.

When he opened the innocuous brown paper package, _tied up with string_ he thought, like some kind of twisted ode to _The Sound of Music_ , only to find Josh's hand wrapped in a white tatter of rag smelling like embalming fluid, he knew he had him.

Nigel, closed fast in the trap he couldn't even see, as Alex raced to the room and pretended to retch into the sink, the porcelain cold under his hands.

He was so hard that it was almost painful, locking the bathroom door behind him and fisting his cock until he was left slumped against the door, limp, white decorating his skin.

When he got back to his room, the hand was gone.

 

_. . .but the dark pressure of her softly parting lips._

—James Joyce [A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/803341)

 

While Nigel now followed Alex in a strange pursuit, Alex ducking away, avoiding him at every opportunity, relishing the intense stares that Nigel levied at him across rooms, and passing by in the corridor, Alex played his own little game with Nigel, a game to which only Alex was party to.

It was funny, in a way that wasn't funny at all, that Nigel attuned himself so much to Alex while Alex was oh so close, just skin away, when Nigel didn't even know it.

It became a routine, slipping from his bed after the last check, lights out, moving quietly through the corridors like a ghost, and gently swinging the door of Nigel's room open. Of all the doors in the school, Nigel's was the only one with impeccably oiled hinges. Alex wondered, absently, his fingers playing with the plastic bag in his pocket, the one that held the chloroformed rag, whether Nigel ever wondered. _Probably not._

The first time he'd been a little nervous, his heart beating a tattoo against his ribs, Edgar Allan Poe's _The Tell-Tale Heart_ from the _Tales of Mystery & Imagination_ they'd just been set to read in class as homework, his mouth dry as he'd checked to see if the lights were off by peering through the keyhole, they were, before coating the hinges with the mechanical grease in his pocket and ever so gently swinging the door open.

He'd been half expecting to meet Nigel's wide-eyed gaze, the question bursting form from his mouth,

"What are you doing here?"

But all he'd been met with was the sight of Nigel sleeping, chest rising and falling peacefully, his thin white tank top barely covering the delicate grooves between his ribs, the light shadows of his nipples.

Alex had had the rag out of his pocket and pressed to Nigel's mouth before he even had time to let his mind catch up with his body, Nigel's nostrils flaring and mouth working under the thin cloth, his arms and legs flailing even as he never woke, slipping from sleep to an even deeper dreaming.

The first time Alex had just looked at Nigel, limp on the white sheets, the door locked safely and enough time on his hands to do whatever he wanted. His lips were slightly puffy from working against the cloth, the bottom lip slightly chapped as usual, and Alex had finally let himself lean over and taste it with his tongue, pulling the bottom lip between his teeth before he licked into Nigel's limp mouth and let himself explore, Nigel only limp and slack with sleep, a line of drool pulling from his mouth as Alex lifted himself away with some reluctance.

He felt oddly powerful, like finally in his life he had control over something.

 _Mine,_ he thought, looking at Nigel. _Mine._

 

_They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech;_

—James Joyce [A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/803341)

 

Alex watched as Nigel worked his way deeper into his little plots, cheeks flushing with jealousy as Alex pretended to court a silly little girl with a nice mouth, though he couldn't image ever kissing something like _that_ , not when he had Nigel waiting for him. Even if Nigel didn't know.

Especially if Nigel didn't know.

Nigel killed her for it, took a little story Alex had planted in his path and spun it into a huge story of eternity and love and, bizarrely, necrophilia. Sometimes Alex wondered if Nigel knew what was happening to him at night, except there was no way he could know.

He hadn't expected Nigel to latch onto the idea that little Susan Mueller was _his_ Maraclea, but then again, jealously made people stupid, and it didn't matter too much in the end anyway. When Nigel left him with the body, Alex poked it once or twice, the skin strange under his fingers, before he imagined Nigel, lying on the slab, the perfect boy, sleeping forever.

 _That_ image got him hard in his pants, as he jerked himself off over the sink, cleaning everything up neatly before Nigel came back, a half smile on his face like he'd figured everything out in a nice way that fit in his head, the idea that Susan, little Sue, was for Alex. Alex didn't care much either way, watching as Nigel used his newly awoken pleasure in killing people to orchestrate the deaths of his parents, though the idea of Nigel getting it on with his dead mother was something he couldn't stomach, storming away in the rain.

"You're mine!" he wanted to shout, punch the words in Nigel's face, actually punch his face, set his knuckles into the skin and bruise, wipe that grin off his face, but he didn't, storming away in the rain instead, leaving Nigel with his little stories that were starting to spin just a little out of control.

 

_and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure,_

—James Joyce [A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/803341)

 

It was never about some crazy story of the Knights Templar, eternity or Maraclea or little Susan, collateral damage of the twisted story between the two of them, an innocent bystander who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It was just Alex wanting something, and not being able to handle it when he got it. When Nigel followed him with the gun, the sky pouring down as though trying to wash them both clean of all the death, trying and failing as they shouted across the tracks, over the muffled sound of the approaching train, the louder sound of its horn, warning them to step away, Alex knew that, inevitably, the game was coming to a close. Time to pick up the toys and put them away.

He could see the lost boy in Nigel's eyes, the lost boy he'd taken and twisted past his already strange character, so obsessed with death that he practiced taxidermy for fun, the boy who was reaching up for help in the only way he knew how as he closed his fingers over the trigger.

The smell of the fired gun reminded Alex of the time before he'd met Nigel, playing with stolen gunpowder in the basement with Josh, Raj jumping back and screaming when they exploded it, laughing at his expression.

A simpler time, before Alex had discovered something he wanted.

It was messy, in the aftermath, but Alex had always been patient. After the autopsy, after his name was finally cleared and the police had been shaken off his back, surprisingly quickly for all their suspicions, it wasn't too hard to do a simple switch, find a random skeleton and swap it while the embalming from the funeral parlour was still fresh enough for him to have something to work with. No one would ever bother to check until it was too late, and bones were bones unless you actually suspected.

His real Maraclea, Nigel, for eternity.

When Alex wanted something, really wanted something, he always got it.

 

_. . .darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour.”_

—James Joyce [A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/803341)

 

**Author's Note:**

> It never really worked to fit it into the narrative, but please assume that Nigel is just as obsessed with dead things and taxidermy as in the film.
> 
> I chose not to describe the somnophilia and necrophilia graphically in the narrative as a style choice; it just didn't seem to fit.


End file.
